Pope Francis Raffles Off His Gifts

Why Is This Important?

Because it’s another small step towards a more progressive and inclusive Catholic Church.

Long Story Short

His Holiness Pope Francis is raffling off numerous gifts he has received since becoming pontiff in March of last year.

Long Story

Pope Francis is raffling off numerous gifts to help raise money for the poor. Posters have been erected around the Vatican announcing the items the Vatican is looking to flip. A four-wheel-drive Fiat Panda, a Homero Ortega brand hat, bicycles, an espresso coffee machine and watches are included among thirteen objects up for grabs, with thirty unspecified consolation prizes.

Tickets on sale at the Vatican cost €10 with the winners to be announced January 8. Reuters reports that in the past, most gifts received by the Vatican have been either placed in storage or given away to missions and other church institutions.

Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina in 1936, has made fighting poverty the number one aim of his papacy. On October 28th, he urged an international gathering of grassroots activists to struggle “against the structural causes of poverty, inequality, the lack of work, land and shelter, the denial of social and labor rights.” Francis’s most recent move to help the poor was the installation of showers around the Vatican for the benefit of homeless people.

The pontiff has also illustrated a remarkably progressive agenda on the topic of gay rights. Bishops gathered in Rome last month for Francis’s Synod on the Family issued a report suggesting that there should be a more inclusive space for gay Catholics to participate in the life of the church. Time reported that in the document bishops said that gay Catholics have “gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community” (although the Independent reported earlier this week on comments made by the pontiff more in line with the Catholic Church’s traditional stance on marriage being a union between a man and a woman).

Pope Francis’s progressivism and focus on corruption has made him enormously popular both inside and outside the church. But perhaps not so much with some of the more conservative cardinals who sit beneath him in the Catholic hierarchy.

A Washington Post op-ed from late last year predicted a curial pushback against Francis if the pontiff doesn’t ease back on the pace of change within the church, quoting prominent US Cardinal Raymond Burke’s comments that, “One gets the impression, or it’s interpreted this way in the media, that [Francis] thinks we’re talking too much about abortion, too much about the integrity of marriage as between one man and one woman. But we can never talk enough about that.”

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: How far to the left can Pope Francis push the Catholic Church before he runs into significant conservative opposition?

Disrupt Your Feed: All this talk of progressivism is just that — talk. When are we going to see some actual change?

Drop This Fact: Latin America is home to a whopping 40 percent of the world’s Catholic population.